Halloween

Victoria and I dressed up as zombie prom queen/king:



Here is the full album:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026848&id=1199470342&l=752881998b

Don't worry, you don't need to be on Facebook to review. I've switched to using Facebook for my photos because the photo uploader in Livejournal is such a piece of crap, even after all these years. You hear that LiveJournal? If you're going to provide a "Scrapbook" feature, how about making it easy to upload photos in bulk?

I made the frontpage of hackaday.com!

It's not everyday that I find my article being referenced on the front page of hackaday.com!


(click the image above to see the screenshot [and click it again to maximize])

Here's the post:

http://hackaday.com/2009/10/27/digital-tuner-reverse-engineering/

And here's the original article I wrote:

http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1003

Cell phone radiation

I thought this little photo tour was interesting primarily because we had a very similar setup where I used to work at the Lucent Global Product Compliance Lab (GPCL):

Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab

If you ever wondered how they tested exposure to cell phones, this is how they do it...

The Duct Tape Programmer

I love Joel on Software. If you're into software development methodology, check out the following:

The Duct Tape Programmer

I especially like this paragraph:

Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritance from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM. And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he does go away, he’s just going back into his office to write more of his clever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritance from templates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

I like how this man thinks...

What planet does Greg-KH live on?

The following article came up in my Google reader feed about Linux desktop:

Linux-Windows gap to remain for five years
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62058636,00.htm

This article had a link to an article from August about the Linux Driver Project:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62056924,00.htm

The article says the following

Back in 2007, Kroah-Hartman requested for help finding more hardware for which to write device drivers. Some reports online suggested that this was because businesses were holding back from opening their drivers up to the community.

Today, this "problem" has been "solved quite thoroughly", he said.

"All of the major hardware manufacturers told me that there is no problem that needs to be solved in relation to device support on Linux.

"Everything they ship worked just fine with Linux back then, and continues to do so today," he said.

Solved quite thoroughly? Are you frigging kidding me? Sure, you're likely to be able to to install Linux without it crashing and it will find your hard drive controller and video card, but suggesting that hardware support is "solved quite thoroughly" is kind of ridiculous. Being someone who spends his evenings working on LinuxTV drivers, I can cite a whole host of examples: A large percentage of devices are not supported at all. Often if they do get supported, it's months (sometimes years) after the product was released for Windows. Almost every card has only a subset of the functionality working. Cards that "work" often just "work barely well enough" to be able to claim they work - riddled with bugs and edge cases.

NDAs to be used for GPL'd drivers continue to be a problem. Fear among chipset vendors of "disclosing trade secrets" and "competitive interests" is still a problem. Getting vendors to provide sample hardware and information about their board layout is still a problem.

Video cards? TV tuners cards? Printers? Scanners? Hell, I've got a laptop with Intel audio (among the most common) and I have to roll the dice everytime I upgrade as to whether the headphone jack is going to work.

Things are certainly better in terms of the Enterprise market, but the desktop market is a mess. Progress has been made and the situation continues to improve slowly, but let's not think that we're anywhere near "thoroughly solved"

I'm not sure if he's delusional or just trying to paint a rosy picture on a bad situation in an attempt to combat people's claims that Linux isn't ready for the mainstream.

Pumpkin

Tonight Victoria and I carved the pumpkin that we picked up at the farmer's market yesterday. We were going for "looks like a kitty!"



Spent the afternoon at Subtle Tea, me doing some LinuxTV driver work while she worked on applications for her internship. Otherwise a fairly quiet afternoon.

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?

Slashdot has an article this morning that was interesting:

How Dangerous Could a Hacked Robot Possibly Be?

I especially like the comments, such as this one:

Fortunately, my insurance company, Old glory, can already protect you TODAY from the danger of robots. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel. And when they grab you with their claws, you can't break free... because robots are made of metal, and they are strong.

On the upside, I own a copy of "How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion", so I am well prepared.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Robot-Uprising-Defending/dp/1582345929/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255019014&sr=8-1

R.I.P. Ol' Entertainer

Goodbye Old Entertainment Center. I remember fondly that hot summer day that I brought you home from Target. And there now you sit, as disassembled as the day I got you - ready to go out with the trash.

I'll miss you!